Pierre Boulez receives the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

The award
ceremony for the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will take place during
the 56th International Festival of Contemporary Music on 6 October. In
past years, the award has gone to other well-known composers such as Goffredo Petrassi (1994), Luciano Berio
(1995), Friedrich Cerha (2006), Giacomo Manzoni (2007), Helmut Lachenmann
(2008), György Kurtág (2009) and Wolfgang Rihm (2010).

Pierre Boulez is a living classic. Ever since the 1950’s,
composers around the world have followed with curiosity what he was writing, to
see if they could adapt his ideas in their own music or to reject them in their
search for an idiom they could call their own. The music the French
composer has written ever since the late 1940’s was a conscious act of
rebellion against tradition as represented by Schönberg or Stravinsky but also
his teacher, Messiaen, whose influence has nevertheless left its mark on
Boulez’s music.

After the
award ceremony, a performance of Incisesand sur Incises will take
place, Susanna Mälkki conducts the Ensemble Intercontemporain.